[Zope3-dev] Re: Zope 3 web root

[Velko Ivanov]

Hello,

I was thinking a lot about the proposed Zope3 web root, and the 
mentioned RDBMS first class citizenship.
I'd like to backup an usecase and propose a somewhat different approach ..

First of all, having the ZODB optional and mountable IMHO is a great 
thing, because it is not always needed, or even usable - imagine for 
example lots of accounting or statistical data, stored in millions of 
rows in a RDBMS, several years old, and presented using charts and grids.
Moreover, I would and do design brand new Zope3 applications using SQL 
storage, not the ZODB, even when the storage is local to the filesystem 
(sqlite), just because I firmly believe, that the place for data is in 
the RDB, not in the ODB. Also because I couldn't find easy and effective 
enough way to get 20 objects out of 100000 pieces in an ordered set, 
starting with number 27897 for example, but that's another story and may 
be entirely my fault as I didn't care to look very hard.
But I know a lot of tasks, which the ZODB is much better suited for, 
especially if it did had that shiny little tool, capable of not only 
analyzing and displaying a stored object, but also changing it - it 
could spare me many minutes worth of restarting and waiting Zope to boot 
each day. It is on my todo list, you know, I just need some spare time. 
And the proposed indirection analyzer tool could spare some 2 months 
full of curiosity and curses as I slowly made my way trough let's say 
about 20% of that rapidly-changing-worst-documented-in-the-world big 
picture (not talking about Zope2, sorry guys, but although the more I 
learn, the more I love Zope3, it's not easy at all).

Anyway, one of the strongest arguments against that web root in the 
filesystem is the Apache - why do we need Zope3 to serve files and 
directories out of the filesystem, and have those config files there, 
when we have a very sophisticated and solid tool, which does that more 
than fine and also a lot more, and more effectively than we can ever 
dream of with an interpreted language?
You know, it wasn't the very next question that I asked myself, although 
it is so obvious, but eventually I got to it - well, why do we need 
Zope3 to parse HTTP requests while it generally and historically proved 
exists proxied behind this very tool, which is so much capable of 
parsing HTTP, and is also so flexible?
Zope3 uses it's integrated twisted server to do everything about parsing 
protocols, but as I already said, we can't even dream of reaching the 
effectiveness of a heavy duty pure C/C++ HTTP machine which has decades 
of development and fine tuning behind, by using an interpreted language.
And remembering the statement from it's own documentation, that Zope 
doesn't care much about what is in front, as long as it supplies the 
right object, then why not just mod_zope it ?
And guess what .. There is that fundamental truth about Internet - it 
doesn't matter what idea just came to you, it is already there.
Turns out that somebody is already doing it at 
http://codespeak.net/z3/modzope/ .
So why not making it at least a bit more official and feature-complete? 
For example - capable of rendering page templates directly from the 
filesystem and mounting ZODBs ..
Integrating with existing and proved solutions seems a lot more natural 
and trouble-proof, than doubling them and Apache has a lot that could be 
used in Zope.

Regards,
Velko Ivanov